Painting the Internet Pink

It seems safe to say that the Justices of the Supreme Court, currently weighing the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act, have not spent their time basking in the soft glow cast by an array of pixels depicting a pink equal sign against a red square backdrop, a symbol that is currently blanketing social-media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Yet millions of users of these networks have supplanted their profile pictures with that symbol to display their support and hope that the Justices will rule in favor of marriage equality.

The symbol, and the campaign that made it iconic, is the brainchild of Anastasia Khoo, the director of marketing for the Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as the “largest civil-rights organization working to achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.” It’s a modification of the H.R.C.’s normal logo, a yellow equal sign against a blue backdrop. It was “decided to tinge it red because it’s the color of love,” Khoo told me. The campaign to get users to change their profile picture started on the H.R.C.’s Facebook page at 1 P.M. on Monday. From there it spread, largely thanks to celebrity support; Khoo singled out the early adoption of the former “Star Trek” actor George Takei, who has over three million Facebook “Likes” and six hundred thousand Twitter followers, as key to its spread. Khoo told me that the campaign is the organization’s most successful in her seven and a half years there, and that “millions” have changed their profile picture to the symbol, though the H.R.C. has not “been able to track all of the different variations” of the logo, many of which are now featured on the H.R.C.’s Facebook page. (Neither Twitter nor Facebook were able to offer an estimate, either.)

It is possible, however, to take a rough measure of how widely shared a particularly instance of that logo is, as first noted by Kenton Ngo. A quirk of a lossy image format like JPEG—that is, one that compresses an image, removing less important data, so that it requires less space on a hard drive and less bandwidth to transmit—is that when an image (or video or audio file) is repeatedly copied, compressed, and redistributed, the process leaves increasingly visible traces. In the case of H.R.C.’s symbol, these artifacts show up as pixelation and smudging, most noticeable around the edges of the pink equal sign; the more distorted and less clear the image, the more it has been copied and recopied. (This video, a riff on Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room,” created by re-uploading a video to YouTube a thousand times, dramatically demonstrates the principle.) In other words, each instance of the H.R.C. logo bears the scars of its own path along the network.

When Malcolm Gladwell wrote that the “revolution will not be tweeted,” it was against the backdrop of the Iranian Green Movement, which also received the support of widespread “profile-pic” activism; millions on Twitter tinted their pictures green. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in office. Gladwell wrote, “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.” This is manifestly true of the majority of people who have erased their profile picture in support of marriage equality; they are not, and have not, engaged in what Gladwell defines as “high-risk” activism, like boycotts and sit-ins under the threat of arrest, abuse, or death. (Though for some, Khoo said, it might be a “first step for someone that may not have been comfortable coming out before, or hasn’t been comfortable voicing their support.”)

Gladwell also notes the importance of strong connections between participants in social movements—the four black freshmen who started a protest outside of Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, were good friends. And while the H.R.C.’s profile-picture activism relies on weak ties, like those between celebrities and their followers, it’s designed to exploit the stronger personal connections that lurk among the web of weak ties in a Facebook profile. That is, you are true friends with at least a few people that you are “friends” with on Facebook, and the H.R.C. hopes that by making “the issue attached to a person, it’s no longer abstract.”

The odds that the H.R.C.’s campaign, as wildly successful as it has been, will directly influence the decision of the Justices are nil, which speaks quite loudly to the limits of online activism: twenty million avatars are not twenty million people in the street. However, as Jeffrey Toobin wrote, as people and politics change, so does the Court. And online activism has shown, most notably through its role in the defeat of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act last year, that maybe it can change people.

Matt Buchanan was a science and technology editor for newyorker.com from 2013 to 2014.